game

Bonny Prince Billy's new album Beware was my purchase for Record Store Day. My daughter and I walked down to the local and she played around with office supplies atop a desk in the corner and with the cat that hangs out in there. Once I we went down there on an extension of our dog walk and they let us bring the dog in. It was like I was in Portland or Austin or one of those insufferably cool places you hear about. Except we are not those places, we are cool in differing ways.

My daughter looked at the CD cover and proclaimed with incredulousness "You bought a CD with an ugly guy on the cover??" but having witnessed Sweet William milling around the bar before a gig, the ugly guy has game. Once at the coffee shop, the barista saw my BPB shirt and said he was hitting on her in the shop before that show. "I told him to hang around a while, that I got off at 8, but he left because someone had promised to give him a massage before the show. Too bad, I woudl've totally given it up." Mind you this is not a barista with which I have a social relationship; this was the first time she said more to me than "Dark, Medium, or Mild" but it is in that way that this place is cool. People will tell you things.

I have not actually given Beware a proper listen because listening to music on physical media is kind of a pain in the ass to me now. I gotta load it on my computer, plug in my this, do that... It was like the one time at an apartment in Redmond, Washington I played an album for the first time from the 4K of albums I'd moved across country with nearly six months earlier. After rifling through the records (I hadn't gotten around to alphabetizing them even) to find Hot Rocks just to listen to "Angie" we deemed this an ordeal. "Who needs it?" Keep in mind there weren't even iPods then.

So, maybe out of guilt, I'm uploading Beware into iTunes to put it on my phone to listen to it while I walk the dog, and in illustrative pathetic fallacy, my laptop is taking forever to do it. I synced my iPhone to my work computer he other day so now its going to take extra forever to get this show on the road, but like a wax cylinder or player piano enthusiast, I am weirdly committed. His "alas poor Yorrick" skull sits trapped in darkness on the couch next to me. The dog is pacing, thinking this walk will never come, but I defiantly click "Erase and Sync" stubborn as a guy playing golf on a rainy Christmas morning.

OK, iTunes wants to take my apps off, and the dog has resorted to chewing on a squeaky toy in her cage. Two iPhone ads have cycled through, mocking me. Abort. One of these days I'll pop this thing into whatever arcane device will play it.

Edit: Technology wins! On the walk I remembered I have Simplify installed on my iPhone and laptop, allowing me to stream music from the latter to the former without it being loaded thereon. So I did get to listen to it. I like it, though I find it a little hokey, self-absorbed, and convoluted, not unlike the process I went through to experience it.